Why I Do Not Shop at Wal Mart

(and why this makes me a hypocrite).

I am back in Lodi visiting my mother after five weeks and five thousand miles through seven states. I stayed on BLM land, in the parking lot of an information center, at truck stops, and at a certain store I am about to talk about.

I call Wal Mart the Evil Empire and refuse to shop there.* This is based on how they treat their employees and also how their business model has killed many small businesses.

But they have cheap stuff and I don’t have much money.

I get it. Lots of nomads—including Bob Wells—shop at Wal Mart. The thing is, you get what you pay for. Not just the products you buy but the business model you’re buying into, you are also buying into the consequences of putting John and Fran’s Market out of business. Yeah, John and Fran didn’t pay you much more than Wal Mart and, yes, the stuff they sold was more expensive than Wal Mart, but when you shopped in their store you were helping support members of your community. When the shore was doing good they’d get their car fixed at Michelle’s repair shop. And when Michelle was flush she’d buy all the books she’d been longing to get from Angelo’s book store and so on all through the community. You think Wal Mart is going to buy from Michelle or Angelo when they have a good month? No, they don’t see your town as a community, they see it as two thousand purchasing units. And let’s look at how it was when you worked for John and Fran. Yeah, the pay wasn’t much, but they treated you like a human being. Even before you became their stock clerk they’d seen you at the park or in Angelo’s or you’d run into each other when they were picking their car up from Michelle’s when you were dropping yours off. When you were having a tough month they’d advance you a couple hundred on future wages. And Wal Mart didn’t just put Bob and Fran out of business, they put Rudy’s Apparel out of business, too. Rudy’s clothes were pretty high quality but they cost more than what you could get at Wal Mart. The townspeople are struggling financially so they settled for buying their outfits at WalMart. So now Rudy’s working at WalMart with you and drinking during his lunch break in the parking lot. This long story can be summed up in one sentence: Things that seem to be cheap are actually very expensive.

East of the Rockies there are very few places to dispersed camp. Man, I got spoiled with all the national forests and BLM land out west. When I was in Kansas and Oklahoma I spent two nights in WalMart parking lots.

So…you go on and on about how evil WalMart is but if those stores hadn’t have existed you wouldn’t have a place to stay?

Yeah, believe me, I struggled with the decision to spend the night at Wally World. It was a survival thing; I needed a safe place to spend the night in an unfamiliar town. That was my reality…but I still think about people like John and Fran and Rudy. I think about all the stuff made in China on the shelves inside those WalMarts and the consequences of that. This article does not have a neat resolution to my moral dilemma—I didn’t support WalMart with a purchase* but I did stay on their property and, some time on future trips, I may have to do it again. I have my beliefs, and some of them—like how I believe WalMart is a huge detriment to our society—go really deep, but if I need a safe place to overnight that outweighs how I feel philosophically. But I may stick to truck stops instead.

*I did shop there one time on my trip. Long story but I was so frustrated I went into the Sierra Vista (Arizona) Wal Mart and bought a fifteen pack of Keystone Light.